At 3 mins- Stewart is right. All this proves
is teaching standards go down from class 1 so by class 3 all the early
gains are lost. The brain is still going in class 3 even by 19th Century
science standards. What the hell is going on? BTW, this bad teaching
techniques/effectiveness data fits my other research on this subject

Stimulus-Hating Gov. Rick Perry Used Stimulus to Balance Texas BudgetGov. Rick Perry used federal stimulus money to pay 97 percent of Texas's budget shortfall in fiscal 2010--which is funny, because Perry spent a lot of time talking about just how terrible the stimulus was. In fact, Texas was the state that relied most heavily on stimulus funds, CNN's Tami Luhby reports.

"Even as Perry requested the Recovery Act money, he railed against it," Luhby writes. "On the very same day he asked for the funds, he set up a petition titled 'No Government Bailouts.'" It called on Americans to express their anger at irresponsible spending.

Thanks to the stimulus funds, Texas didn't have to dip into its $9.4 billion rainy day fund. Still, now that the stimulus is spent, Texas, like many other states, is facing severe cuts--$31 million must be carved from the budget.In other words, Governor Perry CONSISTENTLY used money to balance the budget while cuttng child services even as child abuse increases showing that this policy doesn't work. there can be only one explanation...

Over the past 10 years, more than 20,000 American children are believed to have been killed in their own homes by family members. That is nearly four times the number of US soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The child maltreatment death rate in the US is triple Canada's and 11 times that of Italy. Millions of children are reported as abused and neglected every year. Why is that?

Downward spiral

Part of the answer is that teen pregnancy, high-school dropout, violent crime, imprisonment, and poverty - factors associated with abuse and neglect - are generally much higher in the US.

Further, other rich nations have social policies that provide child care, universal health insurance, pre-school, parental leave and visiting nurses to virtually all in need.

In the US, when children are born into young families not prepared to receive them, local social safety nets may be frayed, or non-existent. As a result, they are unable to compensate for the household stress the child must endure.

In the most severe situations, there is a predictable downward spiral and a child dies. Some 75% of these children are under four, while nearly half are under one.

Geography matters a lot in determining child well-being. Take the examples of Texas and Vermont.

Texas prides itself in being a low tax, low service state. Its per capita income places it in the middle of the states, while its total tax burden - its willingness to tax itself - is near the bottom.

Vermont, in contrast, is at the other extreme. It is a high-tax, high-service state.

The following interviews, and the
information below the interviews, provides a great overview of the
problems with the 'No Child Left Behind' act plus the problems with the
attempts to try and "fix" it (fixing that's already broken is called a "patch job").Interview 1

Notes:1. Congress wouldnt move against the 'no child left behind act' i.e. they like it! 2.
The focus is on 'race to the top' = goal is to make students 'college
and career prepared' focusing on better teachers and want to bring more
parents in and give parents more flexibility Focus for the education department is about working within the already set plan as the only way forward despite the evidence.

Notes:1.
Once again, congress refuses to change the broken 'no child left behind
act' so the new 'race to the top initiative is meant to alleviate its
problems, i.e. its meant as a fix to a broken plan 2.
Amazing creativity coming from States Stewart: Teachers say the
structure set up is more confining because they have to teach to the
test for grant money. The result is that this system is frustrating. [Again
the focus is on fixing a structure that's already broken. Problem is
the Education Department is beginning to think that this broken system
with variations/waivers is the way out] 3. At 7 minutes: 'Our college graduation rates have dropped dramatically and we have to increase this' [With a broken system!]

Notes: 1.
To educate you need to create curiosity and interest. People hate
testing. How easy is it to teach a kid who is bored or hates his or her
school work? 2. "Schools have been turned into testing factories" [Is the new school format a kind of 'war on kids']3. Finland is doing really well in schooling and it doesn't use standardized tests.
Its governmental, strong teachers unions, teachers are encouraged to be
independant. Teachers design thier own tests. [i.e. we have an example
of a system that works and STILL we use a broken education plan!]4.
Teachers across the country are demoralized (getting blamed for all
test score problems) thus this is a great way to get rid of talented
teachers. ALL the problems of schools are being blamed on teachers![Bad
educational policy was blamed solely on the teachers by Bush and it
continues with the GOP]

Book Review: NY Times: Choice
never fulfilled its promises, Ravitch argues, because its advocates
spent more time talking about how education should be delivered than
examining what education is. With so little effort devoted to the
promotion of a sound curriculum, voucher schools, like those established
in Milwaukee, turned out to offer few if any gains for those who
attended them. As for charter schools, they have skimmed off the most
motivated students without producing consistently better results than
traditional public schools. She is skeptical of the charter
movement’s free-market model of competition and choice. “At the very
time that the financial markets were collapsing, and as regulation of
financial markets got a bad name,” Ravitch points out, “many of the
leading voices in American education assured the public that the way to
educational rejuvenation was through deregulation.” Instead of
treating markets as a panacea, she argues, we should look at the data,
the latest of which shows that charter schools as a whole do not do
better than traditional schools. Given that result, we should be working
harder to preserve the benefits of community and continuity that
neighborhood schools offer. Testing experienced much the same fate as
vouchers. Knowing that their students would be tested and that the
results would be used to evaluate which schools would be rewarded,
educators began teaching to the tests, at the expense of sound
curriculum. But educational testing, Ravitch shows, is inexact, roughly
the way public opinion polling is. Far from holding schools accountable, testing resulted in massive cynicism.
Meanwhile the level of education received by many students remained
“disastrously low.” Ravitch points to a 2009 study sponsored by the
Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago showing that the
increases in the performance of the city’s eighth graders in math and
reading were due mostly to changes in testing procedures, and that in
any case such gains evaporated by the time those students reached high
school. Some may ask whether we should trust someone who was once widely
viewed as a conservative but now actually says nice things about
teachers’ unions. But for all the attention paid to Ravitch’s change of
heart, she has always been less an ideologue than a critic of
educational fads, whether the more touchy-feely forms of progressive
education popular in the 1960s and ’70s or the new nostrums of choice
and testing. Ravitch now supports ideas associated with the left
not because she is on the left. She does so for the simple reason that
choice and testing had their chance and failed to deliver.

January 4, 2010 Research is first to find causal link between NCLB and increased student achievement EVANSTON, Ill. --- A new study by Northwestern University researchers for
the first time establishes a causal link between the No Child Left
Behind Act (NCLB) and improvements in student achievement. The
research finds that NCLB raised math achievement by six to nine months
over seven years for the nation's fourth graders and by four to 12
months for eighth graders. It did not find statistically significant
effects for fourth-grade reading achievement. Eighth-grade reading was
not assessed because adequate data were unavailable. "Our study is the
first to confirm that NCLB has a statistically significant positive
effect on students' fourth- and eighth- grade math achievement," said
Thomas Cook, sociology professor in Northwestern's Weinberg College of
Arts and Sciences, faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy Research
(IPR) and co-author of the study. Only a handful of studies to date have
examined the effects of No Child Left Behind -- currently the
centerpiece of U.S. education policy -- and study results have been
mixed.
[Note: By 2012, some teachers have
found creative ways to deal with the horrible constirctions imposed by
the 'no child left behind act']

‘No Child’ Law Is Not Closing a Racial GapThe
achievement gap between white and minority students has not narrowed in
recent years, despite the focus of the No Child Left Behind law on
improving the scores of blacks and Hispanics, according to results of a
federal test considered to be the nation’s best measure of long-term
trends in math and reading proficiency. Between 2004 and last
year, scores for young minority students increased, but so did those of
white students, leaving the achievement gap stubbornly wide, despite President George W. Bush’s frequent assertions that the No Child law was having a dramatic effect.

Growth scores give schools No Child Left Behind alternativeThe
Clark County School District isn't a success under No Child Left
Behind, but that's not the full story, said Ken Turner, special
assistant to the super­intendent. Clark County students learn at a rate
on par with other Nevada schools, according to the growth model's
tracking of fourth-graders through eighth-graders in math and reading.
The model compares students' annual test scores from 2009-10 to 2010-11.
The state plans to join others in applying to the U.S.
Department of Education in September to replace No Child Left Behind
measures with the growth model, a "monumental shift" in education, said
Keith Rheault, Nevada superintendent of public schools. But the growth
model remains a work in progress. At this time, the state growth model
shows no schools as passing or failing because that bar hasn't been set
yet. Information from the pilot program just shows the different rates
of learning achieved at public schools. U.S. Secretary of
Education Arne Duncan has said that won't be allowed to continue if the
model is to replace No Child Left Behind. Schools must be held
accountable. those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it A
conservative effort emerged to remove accurate information from many
textbooks because it was 'gloomy', i.e. lies (which automatically
indoctrinate children) became preferred to actual facts.

The American Textbook Wars: The Revised EditionAs chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Cheney
had once embraced their work but then found that radicals had gone too
far in producing a gloomy, “politically correct” view of the national
past. It only helped that Cheney made her public break with the
standards in the Wall Street Journal, and that her husband was a gruff
former secretary of defense. Interpreted differently,
FitzGerald’s theory has served different groups well. To many liberals,
reforms begun in the 1960s represented an effort by blacks, Native
Americans, Latinos, and others to reclaim their past from a national
narrative that distorted or ignored their experiences. Scholars and
teachers who took part could then cast themselves as successful rebels
for the causes of social justice and historical truth. To conservatives
who rallied behind Cheney, these same minority groups had finally
“hijacked” the national story. The price of a misguided effort at
inclusion was a fragmented and incoherent history curriculum. Opponents
of the standards could then lump questions of history teaching into a
broader assessment of that misbegotten decade. That assessment, still
with us today, is captured succinctly by a promotional line for Woods’s
Politically Incorrect Guide, posted on his publisher’s website: “[T]he
liberalism of the 1960s discouraged all the right things and encouraged
all the wrong ones.” Textbooks and History Standards: An Historical Overview Meanwhile, in 1995,James W. Loewen, a liberal sociologist and professor, published his best-known work, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (1995).
The book reflected his two-year survey of 12 leading high school
textbooks of American History including the venerable The American
Pageant by Thomas A. Bailey and David M. Kennedy, and Triumph of the
American Nation by Paul Lewis Todd and Merle Curti. Loewen wrote that his study revealed a dull Eurocentric history presented with a mix of bland optimism, blind patriotism, and misinformation.
Loewen wrote, “We need to produce Americans of all social classes and
racial backgrounds and of both genders who command the power of
history—the ability to use one's understanding of the past to legitimize
one's actions in the present. Then the past will seriously inform
Americans as individuals and as a nation, instead of serving as a source
of weary clichés." His book offered ideas on how teachers can build
lesson plans about difficult topics such as the American Indian
experience, slavery, and race relations. In the revised 2007 edition of
Lies, Loewen updated his earlier findings and added comments on other
books. He concluded that history textbooks still repeat lies. He
stressed that history texts must challenge students with actual
chronological history, and with images and comments from diverse
viewpoints, leaving each student to come to their own conclusions.

Conclusion: Better
textbooks need to be combined with better teaching methods in an
environment that encourages learning and creativity in education NOT
focusing everything on test scores with grants(money) as the incentive. Schools are about educating children NOT creating a corporate work environment. How education has historically worked effectively (and the learning method used) is explained here.

Quotes

"Make peace with the universe. Take joy in it. It will turn to gold. Resurrection will be now. Every moment, a new beauty." - Rumi

"God is a metaphor for that which transcends all levels of intellectual thought. It's as simple as that." - Joseph Campbell

"Naturally, every age thinks that all ages before it were prejudiced, and today we think this more than ever and are just as wrong as all previous ages that thought so. How often have we not seen the truth condemned! It is sad but unfortunately true that man learns nothing from history." - Carl Jung

"Of all the animosities which have existed among mankind, those which are caused by difference of sentiments in religion appear to be the most inveterate and distressing, and ought most to be deprecated. I was in hopes that the enlightened and liberal policy, which has marked the present age, would at least have reconciled Christians of every denomination so far that we should never again see the religious disputes carried to such a pitch as to endanger the peace of society." - George Washington

“If a problem is fixable, if a situation is such that you can do something about it, then there is no need to worry. If it's not fixable, then there is no help in worrying. There is no benefit in worrying whatsoever.” - Dalai Lama

“Be empty of worrying. Think of who created thought! Why do you stay in prison. When the door is so wide open?” ― Rumi